Lissa maintained a dignified silence, but Jo cackled in delight as a furious blush heated her cheeks.
“You know what they say, don’t you?”
“No, and don’t think I want to!”
“The bigger they are, sweetie, the harder they fall. You’re not the woman I think you are if you can’t bring Evan Henderson to his knees.”
“First, I’m not sure I want him on his knees. Second…”
A heavily ringed finger flapped in her face. “I don’t want to hear any seconds. When’s he coming back to Paradise?”
“When—and I’m quoting here—he can carve another few days from his schedule.”
The feather duster flicked again. A sleek little Siamese stared at Lissa through green glass eyes. The figurine reminded her all too vividly of the equally sleek and just as feline female who Evan swore he was not involved with.
She believed him. The irritating twinge that darted through her at the thought of the two of them working shoulder-to-shoulder fourteen hours a day couldn’t be doubt. Or jealousy. Or any of those other annoying emotions that too often accompanied the first flutters of love.
She hadn’t fallen in love with Evan. She’d only known him for a few weeks. Spent maybe twenty or thirty hours in his company.
The duster moved to the next shelf. Tiny motes swirled. The row of china cats grinned. Unable to stop herself, Lissa grinned back. She had to admit a good number of those twenty or thirty hours in Evan Henderson’s company definitely constituted quality time.
Heat curled through her at the memory of their incredibly erotic session in the easy chair just before he left. She wouldn’t have believed the big, scruffy chair could stand up under such energetic, acrobatic use.
Another of Josephine’s cackles broke into her private reverie. “You should see the look on your face!”
Instantly Lissa rearranged her features. “What look?”
“You went all gooey-eyed on me. Just thinking about him puts a kink in your tummy, doesn’t it?”
Sighing, Lissa gave up the pretense. She didn’t have it in her to lie. “Thinking about him definitely puts a kink somewhere. And the feeling scares the heck out of me.”
A half-dozen parrot-colored plastic bracelets clattered as Josephine took her arm and drew her toward the couch. Lissa sank down, still clutching the feather duster. The blue, orange and green jungle design on her friend’s sequined T-shirt winked in the afternoon sunlight when she settled beside Lissa.
“Did Evan ask you to go back to San Diego with him?” she asked, her eyes bright behind a double row of sparkling rhinestones. “Or at least come for a visit?”
“Several times.”
“Well? What in the world are you hanging around here for? Pack a bag and hit the road, girl.”
“You know it’s not that simple.”
“It’s exactly that simple,” the older woman retorted. Snatching at the duster, she tossed it aside and took Lissa’s hands in both of hers. Her ringed fingers gripped with surprising strength. “You either spend the rest of your life hiding from your past in Paradise, or you decide you want a future and go for it.”
“I’m happy with things just the way they are.”
Not as happy as she’d been two weeks ago, before she’d stopped to pick up a stranded biker, she admitted silently.
“Rubbish,” Jo said tartly. “You need to get out and taste all there is of life…and use the voice God gifted you with to give other folks joy.”
“This voice God gifted me with brought too many folks misery instead of joy.”
“So you’re human? You made a mistake. That doesn’t mean you have to punish yourself for the rest of your life. Look at Johnny Cash. You think he doesn’t know what he’s singing about in ‘Folsom Prison Blues’? Or Willie Nelson. He’s probably still trying to straighten out his problems with the IRS. Adversity didn’t keep either one of them down for long.”
Josephine wasn’t saying anything Lissa hadn’t told herself a hundred times or more. No one was perfect. Everyone, including gospel/country singing stars, messed up. But dread curled in her stomach at the thought of the cameras and microphones that would be thrust at her.
“You don’t know what it was like,” she said quietly. “What it would be like again if I tried to step back into the public eye. The media would rip me to shreds. Rightfully so, considering all that happened. I don’t know if I have the strength to face them down again.”
“Sure you do.” With a brisk tsk-tsk, Josephine patted her hand. “If you and Evan Henderson had come up for air long enough to talk while he was here, maybe you wouldn’t have to face them alone this time. Just think about that while I check on my cactus pear torte.”
Bracelets jangling, she pushed off the sofa and left Lissa thinking.
She was still thinking when Evan called that evening.
He’d called the night he left, just to let her know he’d made it all the way back to San Diego without encountering any jackrabbits, and every night since. She hadn’t yet grown used to the little jolt of pleasure his voice sparked, but his calls had somehow insinuated themselves into the pattern of her evening.
“Hello, Liss.”
“Hello, yourself.”
“What are you doing?”
“Talking to you,” she said dryly.
She could have sworn she heard him smile. It was still hard for her to let down the barriers, but he was learning how to get around them.
“Did you finish ‘One-Way Ticket to Paradise’?”
She threw a glance at the sheets of music stacked neatly beside her keyboard. What had started out as a hymn had somehow transformed itself over the past few days into a sappy, sentimental ballad.
“More or less.”
“Will you sing it for me when you come to San Diego this weekend?”
“Who said I was coming to San Diego?”
“Well, when I called Josephine a while ago to thank her for the homemade jalapeño jelly she sent me, she sort of hinted you might make the trip if I argued my case with sufficient skill.”
It was just curiosity that made her want to hear his arguments. “I’m listening.”
“I miss you.”
She waited, twisting the phone cord around her wrist
“That’s it?” she asked after a long, silent moment. “That’s the sum total of your case?”
“Well, if you want hard evidence, there’s this nagging need to hear the sound of your voice. Take tonight, for instance. I had to kick everyone out of my office for a few minutes just so I could call you.”
Lissa couldn’t help wondering if “everyone” included a certain power-packaged female attorney.
“And then there are the bags under my eyes,” Evan continued. “I haven’t slept in four nights. Every time I stretch out in bed, I see your mouth swollen from my kiss and your body all slick and gleaming with…”
“Okay, okay!” Not for the world would Lissa admit that similar images haunted her. “Enough.”
“So are you going to shake off the dust of Paradise for the weekend?”
“I’ll…” The cord took another couple of loops around her nervous fingers. “I’ll think about it.”
Evan hung up a few minutes later, only half aware of the harbor nightscape outside his windows. He’d cracked some recalcitrant witnesses in his time, but Lissa could give any one of them lessons in digging in their heels and hanging tough.
He might as well resign himself to that fact that she’d poke her nose out of her bolt-hole when, and only when, she was ready. Like her, Evan had a pretty good idea of the hazards awaiting her if and when she did. One of her former fans could recognize her. The media could sniff her out. The nightmare she was trying so hard to put behind her could burst into the headlines all over again.
This time, though, the press might just have the real villain in the piece to glom onto. Fierce satisfaction shot through Evan at the thought of the call he’d taken from his brother a few minutes ago.
Marsh, bless his bulldog soul, had just delivered the news that one of his contacts had spotted Jonah “Doc” Dawes in Cuidad Juárez, just across the river from El Paso. Evidently the man had descended from his mountaintop retreat to meet with a “business associate.”
Marsh had conducted some business with that particular “associate” himself and hadn’t hesitated to lean on him. The nervous banker had agreed to lure Dawes to a meeting place in El Paso. Customs was set to nail the bastard the moment he set foot on this side of the border.
In the meantime, all Evan could do was wait. And hope to heck Lissa would decide to make the drive into San Diego.
He had it bad, he admitted with a shake of his head. Really bad. Imagining his brothers’ gleeful reaction to the news the last Henderson had finally bit the dirt, he turned his back on the spectacular nightscape…and froze.
Carrie lounged in the doorway, arms crossed, chin up. A brittle smile tracked across her face.
“I heard you mention Paradise.”
Evan could only guess what else she’d heard.
“I suppose you were talking to the blonde I met when I drove out to that hellhole to pick you up. Let me think…what was her name? Lissa James, wasn’t it? Melissa James?”
He didn’t so much as blink an eye. If Carrie was on a fishing expedition, Evan didn’t intend to bait her line.
“Did you want something?”
She studied him for a long moment before pushing away from the doorjamb with a jerky movement that lacked her usual feline grace. Her eyes hard, she shook her head.
“No. Not anymore.”
Two days later, Lissa sat with both hands locked around the steering wheel of the pickup. The engine rumbled the floorboards beneath her feet. Cool air pumped from the air-conditioning vents, causing the little Kewpie doll dangling from the rearview mirror to dance and shake her tasseled hips.
She could do it, she told herself grimly. She could cut the engine. Climb out of the truck. Walk across the street to the convenience store.
She’d been working up the nerve for this trip into LaGrange ever since Evan’s call the other night. However much she balked at it, she had to come to grips with her past before she could let herself think about a future that might or might not include Evan Henderson. And however much she wanted to deny it, her past included Robert Stockton Arlen James.
Knuckles white, she waited until two teenagers finished paying for their gas and drove off. A sickening mix of emotions churned in her stomach as she reached for the door handle.
He looked up when she walked in, a polite expression on his whiskered face. For an instant, just an instant, a muscle twitched in his cheek. Then brown eyes set deep in sunken sockets smiled a welcome.
“Can I help you?”
She hadn’t thought any further than this moment. Hadn’t worked out a polite way to ask if he’d dumped his daughter in the street outside the South Oklahoma City Baptist Children’s Home twenty-four years ago. Thankful that her tiered denim skirt came equipped with deep pockets, Lissa shoved her fists in and decided she didn’t owe him polite.
“Are you Arlen James?”
The smile drained from his eyes. Every cord in his neck went taut. “Yes.”
“Robert Stockton Arlen James?”
If she’d harbored any doubts at all, the slow leaching of all color from his face would have banished them.
“Yes.”
Her nails dug into her palms. “Why are you in LaGrange?”
Below his unshaven chin, his Adam’s apple made a slow, torturous slide down and back up his throat. “I just wanted…to know you’re okay.”
Sure you did, a raw corner of Lissa’s mind sneered. Every breath she pulled into her throat lacerated the lining. Her chest ached with a pain she thought she’d banished forever the day she tossed her ragged, one-eyed Pooh Bear in the garbage can.
“A little late with your concern, aren’t you? Like maybe, twenty-four years?”
He managed a single nod. “I followed your career, Missy. From your very first album.”
Somehow, she wasn’t surprised. With a detachment that rose above her inner torment, Lissa searched for some resemblance between this stranger and her hazy image of the father who’d abandoned her. Vaguely she recalled wavy brown hair, not sparse, shaggy gray. And wide shoulders she once rested her cheek against, not the thin, stooped frame before her. And his scent… She’d never forget that blend of Old Spice and cheap whiskey.
“Your songs gave me hope for a few moments…before I lost it again in a bottle.” He cleared his throat with a painful rasp. “Then I read about your trial in an old magazine I picked out of a trash can. My heart ached for you.”
“Did it?” She was proud of the cool, sardonic arch to her brow.
“That’s the day I stopped drinking.”
She steeled her heart against the soul-deep regret in his eyes.
“I sat in the gutter, reading that story and knew I had to find you.”
She let her silence speak for itself.
“I couldn’t…” He swallowed again, his neck muscles straining with the effort. “I couldn’t guide you through your younger years, but I thought maybe…” He lifted his arms, let them drop in a helpless gesture. “Maybe I could help you through these troubles.”
How? Lissa wondered scornfully. He didn’t know her, didn’t have even the vaguest idea what made her tick. Why in the world did he think he could help her?
“So you poked through the McNabbs’ mail until you found my address?”
“Yes.”
The silence spun out, longer this time, lost in the unbreachable chasm that separated them.
“I drive down to Paradise on my days off,” he admitted hoarsely. “Mostly I just go straight through town, like I’m on my way to Yuma, then turn around a few hours later and head back to LaGrange. A couple of times, early morning, I parked off in the distance and watched you jog.”
So that explained the itchy feeling she’d experienced.
“One evening, I got up the nerve to start up the road up to your trailer, but your dog started howling and I turned tail and ran.”
“That seems to be a habit with you.”
She meant the comment to bite into his soul, and it did. The little color that had crept back into his face seeped out again, but he didn’t look away or try to excuse the inexcusable.
A sigh started deep in Lissa’s heart. After all these years, what did it matter? They were strangers, she and this hollow-eyed man. Hurting him wouldn’t erase her pain, and would only make a mockery of the love the McNabbs had showered on her.
“What do you want from me?” she asked, deciding to get to the end of this awkward, tawdry scene before the tears stinging the back of her eyes worked their way to the front.
An unutterable sadness filled his face. “Nothing, Missy.”
No! She wouldn’t feel sorry for him! “Good! Because I don’t have anything to…”
The jangle of the phone cut through her terse reply. The stranger—she couldn’t bring herself to think of him as her father—let it ring. Twice. Three times. Until the discordant jangle scraped Lissa’s nerves raw and unshed tears burned her eyes.
“Answer it,” she muttered, whirling. “I’ve got to go to the ladies’ room.”
She brushed past potato chips and cheese snacks, heading for the door tucked between the milk cooler and the coffee machine.
“Yeah, this is Arlen,” she heard the man behind the counter acknowledge. “Who’s this?”
Her hand was on the doorknob when a familiar name pierced her whirling thoughts.
“Hawthorne? I don’t know any Hawthorne.”
Lissa froze. Her gaze cut back to the shaggy-haired stranger holding the phone. A frown sliced into his brow as he listened for a moment.
“Why would someone from the San Diego D.A.’s office give my name to a TV reporter?” he asked slowly.
The answer spread disbelief across his face.
Chapter 14
One shoulder propped against the doorjamb of Lissa’s tiny bedroom, Evan surveyed the chaos. Clothes were strewn across every horizontal surface. Cardboard boxes crowded the bed and most of the available floor space.
It was late, long past midnight. Evan still wore the road grit and windburn from his wild ride through the night. He hadn’t wasted any time after he’d listened to Charlie’s phone message. Hadn’t even bothered to track Carrie Northcutt down and confront her. He’d find out whether she was the one who’d contacted Dave Hawthorne when he got back. Right now, his primary concern—his only concern—was Lissa.
“I’ll say it one more time,” he told her. “I didn’t give your father’s name to that reporter.”
“I believe you.”
She didn’t act as though she did. Yanking out the bottom drawer of the built-in dresser, she dumped its contents into a box. She’d been like this since Evan arrived fifteen minutes ago. Driven. Determined. Withdrawn, as if she’d already shaken the dust of Paradise from her heels…and him along with it.
“Just out of curiosity, were you planning to call me before or after you hit the road?”
The dresser drawer jammed back into place. She stared at its scarred fiberboard front for several seconds before slowly pushing to her feet. Her eyes found his across the jumble on the bed.
“I hadn’t planned on calling you at all.”
The barriers were back up, so thick and prickly a less determined man would need a chain saw to get through them. Evan wasn’t packing a chain saw, only an iron will every bit as stubborn as hers. He let a hint of it show in the steel underlying his lazy reply.
“That’s kind of the way I figured it, too.”
A flush climbed her throat. Her chin tipped up in defiance…or was it desperation? She kept the width of the bed between them, maintaining a physical as well as emotional distance.
The Harder They Fall (Intimate Moments) Page 14
